Top 500 Joseph Conrad Quotes (2025 Update)
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301. “The beauty of the loved woman exists in the beauties of Nature.”

— Joseph Conrad

302. “La fuerza no es sino una casualidad nacida de la debilidad de los otros.”

— Joseph Conrad

303. “Nobody, nobody is good enough.”

— Joseph Conrad

304. “And for a moment it seemed to me as if I also were buried in a vast grave full of unspeakable secrets.”

— Joseph Conrad

305. “I suppose everybody must be always just a little homesick.”

— Joseph Conrad

306. “I said; ‘his example too. Yes, his example. I forgot that.’ “‘But I do not. I cannot – I.”

— Joseph Conrad

307. “One rule holds good of most young men – whether rich or poor. They never have money for the necessaries of life, but they have always money to spare for their caprices – an anomaly which finds its explanation in their youth and in the almost frantic eagerness with which youth grasps at pleasure.”

— Joseph Conrad

308. “You can’t, in sound morals, condemn a man for taking care of his own integrity. It is his clear duty.”

— Joseph Conrad

309. “Books may be written in all sorts of places. Verbal inspiration may enter the berth of a mariner on board a ship frozen fast in a river in the middle of a town.”

— Joseph Conrad

310. “I am stupid, am I not? What more can I want? If you ask them who is brave – who is true – who is just – who is it they would trust with their lives? – they would say, Tuan Jim. And yet they can never know the real, real truth...”

— Joseph Conrad

311. “The revolutionary spirit is mighty convenient in this, that it frees one from all scruples as regards ideas.”

— Joseph Conrad

312. “To a teacher of languages there comes a time when the world is but a place of many words and man appears a mere talking animal not much more wonderful than a parrot.”

— Joseph Conrad

313. “Let a fool be made serviceable according to his folly.”

— Joseph Conrad

314. “All this happened in much less time than it takes to tell, since I am trying to interpret for you into slow speech the instantaneous effect of visual impressions.”

— Joseph Conrad

315. “I remained, and went on with my dinner. I believe I was considered brutally callous. However, I did not eat much.”

— Joseph Conrad

316. “The simple old sailor, with his talk of chains and purchases, made me forget the jungle and the pilgrims in a delicious sensation of having come upon something unmistakably real. Such a book being there was wonderful enough; but still more astounding were the notes penciled in the margin, and plainly referring to the text. I couldn’t believe my eyes! They were in cipher! Yes, it looked like cipher.”

— Joseph Conrad

317. “Here’s the main page of motivational quotes, if you want a different topic. Gossip is what no one claims to like, but everybody enjoys.”

— Joseph Conrad

318. “You fellows know there are those voyages that seem ordered for the illustration of life, that might stand for a symbol of existence. You fight, work, sweat, nearly kill yourself, sometimes do kill yourself, trying to accomplish something – and you can’t. Not from any fault of yours. You simply can do nothing, neither great nor little – not a thing in the world – not even marry an old maid, or get a wretched 600-ton cargo of coal to its port of destination.”

— Joseph Conrad

319. “The artist in his calling of interpreter creates because he must. He is so much of a voice that, for him, silence is like death.”

— Joseph Conrad

320. “She feared the unknown as we all do, and her ignorance made the unknown infinitely vast.”

— Joseph Conrad

321. “Beyond the fence the forest stood up spectrally in the moonlight, and through the dim stir, through the faint sounds of that lamentable courtyard, the silence of the land went home to one’s very heart – its mystery, its greatness, the amazing reality of its concealed life.”

— Joseph Conrad

322. “There is no peace and no rest in the development of material interests. They have their law, and their justice. But it is founded on expediency, and is inhuman; it is without rectitude, without the continuity and the force that can be found only in a moral principle.”

— Joseph Conrad

323. “She was highly gifted in the art of human intercourse which consists in delicate shades of self-forgetfulness and in the suggestion of universal comprehension.”

— Joseph Conrad

324. “Kings, ministers, aristocrats, the rich in general, kept the people in poverty and subjection; they kept them as they kept dogs, to fight and hunt for their service.”

— Joseph Conrad

325. “To slay, to love – the greatest enterprises of life upon a man! And I have no experience of either.”

— Joseph Conrad

326. “Being a lady is a frightfully troublesome assignment, since it comprises mainly in managing men.”

— Joseph Conrad

327. “The mind of man is capable of anything-because everything is in it, all the past as well as all the future. What was there after all? Joy, fear, sorrow, devotion, valour, rage-who can tell?-but truth-truth stripped of its cloak of time. Let the fool gape and shudder-the man know, and can look on without a wink. But he must at least be as much of a man as these on the shore. He must meet the truth with his own true stuff-with his own inborn strength.”

— Joseph Conrad

328. “The priests talk of consecrated ground! Bah! All the earth made by God is holy; but the sea, which knows nothing of kings and priests and tyrants, is the holiest of all.”

— Joseph Conrad

329. “The fault of this country is the want of measure in political life. Flat acquiescence in illegality, followed by sanguinary reaction – that, senores, is not the way to a stable and prosperous future.”

— Joseph Conrad

330. “I have attempted to tear asunder the veil you have hung to conceal from us the pain of life, and I have been wounded by the mystery... Oedipus, half way to finding the word of the enigma, young Faust, regretting already the simple life, the life of the heart, I come back to you repentant, reconciled, O gentle deceiver!”

— Joseph Conrad

331. “But about feelings people really know nothing. We talk with indignation or enthusiasm; we talk about oppression, cruelty, crime, devotion, self-sacrifice, virtue, and we know nothing real beyond these words.”

— Joseph Conrad

332. “For the dead can live only with the exact intensity and quality of the life imparted to them by the living.”

— Joseph Conrad

333. “Everybody had to be thoroughly understood before being accepted.”

— Joseph Conrad

334. “The sea, perhaps because of its saltiness, roughens the outside but keeps sweet the kernel of its servants’ soul.”

— Joseph Conrad

335. “I had turned away from the picture and was going back to the world where events move, men change, light flickers, life flows in a clear stream, no matter whether over mud or over stones.”

— Joseph Conrad

336. “For a moment I had a view of a world that seemed to wear a vast and dismal aspect of disorder, while, in truth, thanks to our unwearied efforts, it is as sunny an arrangement of small conveniences as the mind of man can conceive.”

— Joseph Conrad

337. “Life knows us not and we do not know life – -we don’t know even our own thoughts. Half the words we use have no meaning whatever and of the other half each man understands each word after the fashion of his own folly and conceit. Faith is a myth and beliefs shift like mists on the shore; thoughts vanish; words, once pronounced, die; and the memory of yesterday is as shadowy as the hope of tomorrow.”

— Joseph Conrad

338. “It was rather like a forced-on numbness of spirit. The long, long stress of a gale does it; the suspense of the interminably culminating catastrophe; and there is a bodily fatigue in the mere holding on to existence within the excessive tumult; a searching and insidious fatigue that penetrates deep into a man’s breast to cast down and sadden his heart, which is incorrigible, and of all the gifts of the earth – even before life itself – aspires to peace.”

— Joseph Conrad

339. “The true Razumov had his being in the willed, in the determined future – in that future menaced by the lawlessness of autocracy – for autocracy knows no law – and the lawlessness of revolution.”

— Joseph Conrad

340. “Criticism, that fine flower of personal expression in the garden of letters.”

— Joseph Conrad

341. “A historian may be an artist too, and a novelist is a historian, the preserver, the keeper, the expounder, of human experience.”

— Joseph Conrad

342. “Things and men have always a certain sense, a certain side by which they must be got hold of if one wants to obtain a solid grasp and a perfect command.”

— Joseph Conrad

343. “This mournful and restless sound was a fit accompaniment to my meditations.”

— Joseph Conrad

344. “A modern fleet of ships does not so much make use of the sea as exploit a highway.”

— Joseph Conrad

345. “The word “ivory” rang in the air, was whispered, was sighed. You would think they were praying to it. A taint of imbecile rapacity blew through it all, like a whiff from some corpse. By Jove! I’ve never seen anything so unreal in my life. And outside, the silent wilderness surrounding this cleared speck on the earth struck me as something great and invincible, like evil or truth, waiting patiently for the passing away of this fantastic invasion.”

— Joseph Conrad

346. “Admiration was a sentiment unknown to her – first, as always more or less tainted with mediocrity, and next, as being in a way an admission of inferiority. And both were frankly inconceivable to her nature.”

— Joseph Conrad

347. “He knew that an apple should not be plucked while it is green. It will fall of itself when ripe, but if picked unripe the apple is spoiled, the tree is harmed, and your teeth are set on edge.”

— Joseph Conrad

348. “Some great men owe most of their greatness to the ability of detecting in those they destine for their tools the exact quality of strength that matters for their work.”

— Joseph Conrad

349. “Slavery is an awful thing,” stammered out Kayerts in an unsteady voice. “Frightful – the sufferings,” grunted Carlier with conviction.”

— Joseph Conrad

350. “Unhappy Europe! Thou shalt perish by the moral insanity of thy children!”

— Joseph Conrad